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Greens senator David Shoebridge has called out Australian government policies on consulting and conflicts of interest regarding employment of former staff.
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“It’s true … that someone can go from being a director-general of ASIO on 1 January, take a month off and go to be the IGIS inspector a month later? Or they can move from being in charge of ASIS on 1 July and then go to be the inspector-general on 2 July?” he said during a Senateon at the Parliament of Australia on 5 September.
“They can literally walk out, have a fortnight off, and then go straight into being the independent inspector of the agency they’ve just walked out of. You can go from A to B via a fortnight off in Bali, can’t you?
“When somebody goes from being in charge of an intelligence agency one day and then a month later finds themselves as the independent inspector appointed by the government … That’s not arbitrary, that’s a genuine conflict of interest where, potentially, they’re marking their own homework.”
In August, Senator Shoebridge raised concerns about the outsourcing of key government functions to consultants and alleged conflicts of interest in Defence contracts.
He accused Defence of handing consultancy Ernst & Young an $8.4 million contract to design Australia’s nuclear submarine regulator, despite its involvement with the nuclear power industry and reporting of conflict of interests in the energy sector.
EY has repeatedly advocated for an expanded nuclear industry and worked with major nuclear power companies, Senator Shoebridge said.
“It’s genuinely unbelievable that in the middle of a national scandal about outsourcing core government functions to the big four consultants, Defence has gifted an $8.5 million contract to one of them to design a new national nuclear regulator,” he said.
“It was always wrong to have Defence in control of its own regulator for the AUKUS nuclear submarines and now we can see how they have handpicked a pro-nuclear consultant to design the whole thing.
“This wasn’t an open tender at all, Defence chose Ernst & Young from a large panel without going to market or it seems, even considering serious conflicts of interest.
“No one can have any comfort in a nuclear regulatory body designed by a handpicked consultant with so many obvious conflicts of interest.
“Ernst & Young has deep conflicts of interest here, as it repeatedly pushes for an expanded global nuclear energy industry and through its role as the ongoing auditor of TEPCO, the Japanese energy giant responsible for the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
“In its Australian operations, Ernst & Young is already under investigation by the NSW government over conflicts of interest related to the gas industry, but none of this seems to trouble Defence.
“International nuclear energy standards make it clear that nuclear regulators must be structurally and functionally independent which means the nuclear submarine regulator should never have sat with Defence in the first place.”
